


Unravel

by KeybladeCryptography



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Character Death In Dream, Chirithy Deserves Better, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreamsharing, Gen, It sounded cooler in my head, Just kind of a weird one in general I don't know, Moral Dilemmas, So many good tags ty ao3, Sorry Chirithy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:21:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26853622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeybladeCryptography/pseuds/KeybladeCryptography
Summary: Rox and Ven WeekDay 2: SleepJust as Naminé has power over memories, Roxas has power over dreams. The only difference is that he doesn't know it...yet. Reluctantly, Chirithy decides they must do something about it.
Relationships: Chirithy & Naminé (Kingdom Hearts), Chirithy & Roxas (Kingdom Hearts), Chirithy & Ventus (Kingdom Hearts), Naminé & Roxas (Kingdom Hearts), Roxas & Ventus (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Unravel

Chirithy sees it when they first lay their stitched eyes on the boy, feels it in the shift of pressure in the atmosphere of their fabricated heart. Somehow, Ven’s look alike is like them. There is something hushed hidden deep within his wildness, something loose and seeking like stray string wrapped around his heart and coiled in his blood. Chirithy doesn’t tell him this. The boy is as human as Ven, of course he is, he fought so bitterly for it. Chirithy doesn’t blame him. Human beings are dreamers and what better thing is there to be?

The boy comes around often and Chirithy comes to know him. They know that his name is stolen and given and borrowed and reclaimed and that it’s Roxas and that it suits him. The first syllable is solid like concrete, sharp like black steel blades, but once you get past the sigil it trails off with a soft hiss and melts into a pool of red-orange-pink-gold light. It’s a nice name. They know that Roxas looks like Ven but they sound and smell different. Ven has always been a quiet boy who speaks in soft and dulcet tones, who sounds like the swish of grass in the breeze and bird song. He smells like spring and honey and morning dew. Roxas is intense even in his silence and he shouts like a storm when he’s excited and he smells like ozone and oil and sea salt. They know that Roxas is an old soul for his two or sixteen years but that doesn’t always manage to temper his impulsiveness or his curiosity. They know that unlike Ven, who cannot hate anyone at all, Roxas hates liars and secret-keepers.

Chirithy comes to love Roxas just as they love Ven but they know that Roxas would hate them, if only he knew.

Roxas brings a girl with him once, a fey and timid slip of a thing and Chirithy realizes that, setting aside some differences in personality, she and Roxas are almost the same. Her name is Naminé and everyone who says it says it gently, as if saying it otherwise would make it no longer hers. Chirithy’s willing to believe it. She looks as if she could be blown away by a gale but Chirithy can easily see the strength in her heart, her eyes, her thin smile, and most of all her hands.

Naminé is an enchantress with power that Chirithy has only known once before her. Her magic is a quiet, creeping thing that sings like the tides under her skin and becomes her. It spreads throughout her body and fills her veins and spills out of her, rolling through the air in waves that make Chirithy shudder at her potential. But it all begins and ends in her hands.

Chirithy looks at her and looks at Roxas and they know that Roxas is blessed and cursed with magic like hers, quiet and creeping and overflowing and intrinsic to him. Instead of his hands it curls up in the corners of his head, hidden beneath his crown of golden spikes and sleeping with one eye open in his skull. Instead of memory, Roxas’s magic touches the same realm Chirithy’s does: that of dreams.

Chirithy asks Naminé about it while Roxas and Ven make a competition of trying to impress her by skipping stones across the lake. Her fingers tense where they’re laced together over her lap and she shakes her head. “He doesn’t know,” she tells them. “I didn’t think anyone else did and I don’t know how to tell him.” She hesitates and splays her thin fingers over Chirithy’s head and they lean into it but only after flinching away at first. Naminé sees it, they know she does, but she has the grace not to fault them for it. “I’m sorry, Chirithy, I know we don’t know each other well but . . . can you help him for me?”

“Sure!” Chirithy says, and drives the point home with a somersault just for show but there’s moths in their stomach. Naminé laughs, also just for show, and scratches them between the ears. “Thank you,” she says. “I hope we can become good friends. I think that there’s a lot of things I’d like to ask you.”

“I hope so too, Naminé. There’s a lot of things that I want to ask you too.” She nods, only once with a slight tilt of her head before unfolding her limbs and walking away to skip a stone farther than either Ven or Roxas managed.

Roxas stays over for the night at the Land of Departure a week later and Chirithy greets him at the door before somersaulting away. A plan forms in their head and guilt begins to gnaw at their core but they shake their head, nearly falling in the process. They remember the weight of Naminé’s small hand, the force of magic filling her sylphlike body, barely sealed by her calm nature. Knowledge is power and Chirithy’s life’s work has been withholding it. They don’t want to do that this time. They can’t. It would be too dangerous.

Chirithy re-emerges as Roxas and Ven settle down for bed. Ven questions them with a tilt of his head and Chirithy’s ears droop which is enough to get him to aside any questions for the morning. Chirithy’s eyes narrow into tense lines as they wait for the boys to change into pajamas and brush their teeth and finally turn off the light. Ven gathers Chirithy in his arms like he does every night, presses his face into his favorite corner of his favorite pillow, and falls asleep. Roxas stares at the star stickers on the ceiling a few minutes longer before joining him.

Once they’re sure that neither boy will wake soon, Chirithy crosses over with them and does the one thing they were told they never must do: They leave Ven’s sleep and dreams untouched.

They do not give Roxas this same kindness. Roxas’s magic loosens, the strings floating freely in the somnolent stratosphere, a storm system with nowhere to go. Chirithy grasps them, twines them around their paw, and pulls Roxas into Ven’s dream. They do not touch it. They shove down their anxiety and hide in the familiar recesses of Ven’s consciousness and observe.

Seconds or minutes or hours pass and Roxas’s eyes widen and the hair on the back of his neck stands on end. He hesitates. He knows something is different, something is wrong, but he doesn’t understand and Chirithy needs him to, so they pull the strings again and watch them unravel. Roxas gathers them in his hands and grasps them tight, knuckles going white. In the realm of sleep his magic is the strongest part of him. Try as he might, he cannot resist it and he's swept away by his own wanderlust. Beneath Chirithy’s watchful eye, he roams. 

Ven’s dream grows and shifts and surrounds them. Betwixt the dark branches of a forest that is many forests and has my names and does not exist, Ven looks up at the glittering night sky. A meteor passes by overhead and melts the forest down into a city made of cobblestone and crocuses and stars when it touches the horizon line. Roxas swings his head around, he doesn’t know this place, but it’s all too familiar to Chirithy. They want to end things now and they could but they can’t. They can’t keep delaying the inevitable. This must happen, not just for Roxas but for Ven too. They watch and they wait and they wrong the masters of centuries past.

Hearts bloom from the crocuses and Lux solidifies into faces and limbs around them. All these years later, Chirithy still knows their names. They mourn them all. Ven runs to them and greets them and they all answer him with smiles. Ephemer ruffles his hair and Brain covers it with his hat. Lauriam presses candied flowers into his palm while Skuld chides him for being late and asks if he’s been getting enough sleep lately. Strelitzia-

Chirithy wants-

Chirithy can’t.

Roxas approaches them and shakes Ven by the shoulder. No answer. Roxas has been wandering within the dream but he has not touched it and changed it and made himself a part of it. Roxas shakes him again. A third time. Ven, twelve years old, turns around and greets him like a stranger. Roxas recoils. He flinches from Ephemer’s touch and shoves Brain’s arm away. He throws the candied flowers to the birds and tells Skuld to can it and they all answer him with smiles. Except Strelitzia.

Except Strelitzia because she is dead and night falls and stars fall and Roxas falls against the wooden crates in the abandoned warehouse as Ven stands on tiptoe to wrap his bloodied hands around Roxas’s neck and squeezes. 

“Why am I doing this?” he asks. “Help me.”

Roxas thinks of the dead girl with the sunset hair and Strelitzia sprouts from between the floorboards and impales Ven with Starlight. 

It’s just a dream.

Roxas runs past her and grips at his strings like a lifeline as they unwind before him. The scenery morphs around him again as Ven's mind tries to regain control over his dream. A dizzying light show of stars and flowers and laughter and death plays out and Roxas clutches his head and holds out his trembling hand. Everything comes to a standstill, engulfed in bloody twilight. Roxas examines his hands one at a time, never releasing the spool of thread emanating from him. He looks up and his expression becomes grim and Chirithy sees that he is beginning to understand. He follows the path laid out for him by his intuition to the source of the dream, where Ven, sixteen, lays sprawled in a field near the mossy wishing well. Roxas raises his hand and scissors appear in it. With a snip, the dream ends.

Both boys awaken with a gasp. Chirithy remains silent. 

“Roxas? You’re awake too?” Ven asks.

Roxas grasps his quilt because the strings of his magic aren't readily visible to him anymore, they've retreated back into his heart, back into his head. “Yeah. I’m . . . I’m sorry, Ven.”

Ven tilts his head and the obvious question begins to form but his arm brushes against Chirithy’s head and somehow he knows. Chirithy hops away from him but Ven draws them back into the crook of his elbow with a tired smile that Chirithy is sure they don’t deserve. “It’s okay, Rox,” Ven says. His tongue his heavy in his mouth and he tugs at the covers, pulling them up to his chin. “It’s not your fault. We’ll talk about it in the morning, okay?”

Roxas sighs and Chirithy wonders if their little act of rebellion was worth it. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Goodnight, Ven.”

“G’night.” Ven presses his face into the fluff of Chirithy’s neck. “I’m not mad. You had your reasons, right?”

Chirithy doesn’t answer and Ven doesn’t prompt them too. He’s a good kid. “Goodnight, Chirithy.”

“Goodnight, Ven.”

**Author's Note:**

> So...yeah. This is. A thing. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Me too.  
> It's like half past midnight right now so I'm technically late but uh...I tried. I had school. It's whatever.  
> Still not entirely dissatisfied with this piece honestly? But that might be the sleep deprivation. Who knows.  
> Follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/CrepusculeChaos) for more content. Not good content, necessarily. Just content.  
> Bye.


End file.
